While Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is an intriguing novel and enjoyable read, in terms of historical research it is, to be candid, a travesty. His claims of accuracy notwithstanding, the book has too many mistakes for any historian to take it seriously.

For example, his claim about how the Dead Sea Scrolls depict Jesus reveals that he has not read them. The scrolls in fact do not mention Jesus, and most were written before his birth. Whereas Brown insists that the book’s architectural portrayals are accurate, he ends the book with a fictitious Star of David in Rosslyn Chapel. In similar fashion, he insists that Da Vinci and others he names were genuine members of a real Priory of Sion, apparently unaware that the documents on which this “information” is based are known to be forgeries.

Much of the author’s “historical information” about Jesus and the early church rests on Medieval legends or even later stories of Freemasons. The oldest sources he relies on are unreliable, and sometimes he even gets them wrong. For example, he mixes up the language in which the gnostic gospels were written. The gnostic gospels stem from the second century (and later) and thus reflect later gnostic traits more than the early Galilean background relevant to the first-century gospels included in our Bibles. By contrast, the Gospel writer Luke, for example, had access to both written sources and eyewitness traditions (Luke 1:1-4). Gnostic teachings were never accepted by the majority of Christians.

One of Brown’s characters claims that Constantine, in the fourth century, chose which four Gospels would enter the canon and that he also turned Jesus into a god. In Brown’s defense, this character turns out to be unreliable later in the book. Still, in the second century, church fathers, such as Irenaeus, were already defending exactly our four gospels and affirming Jesus’ deity, which also is undisputed in parts of the New Testament, including John’s Gospel. Even for many gnostics, the issue was not so much whether Jesus was fully God — it was whether he was fully human!

Brown claims that Israel worshiped the female deity Shekinah in the Holy of Holies, alongside Yahweh. For such speculation to be accurate, the Old Testament must be fabricated; Christians and Jews must have conspired together to fabricate it; and Brown’s speculation, in the absence of ancient archaeological or literary evidence, depends on the dismissal of all genuine evidence.

The same must be said of his claim of spirituality-through-sex. That the Bible condemns it he blames on Catholic attempts to suppress happiness. But Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians would have had to falsify the same Bible. Unlike sexually active pagan gods made in humans’ image, the God of the Bible is spirit, and formed male and female together in his image. Brown’s reversion to paganism may be appealing today, but it comes at a price.

That many secularists tacitly tolerate the portrayal of the Catholic Church hierarchy reluctantly covering up the falsehood of their faith is also disconcerting. One would have hoped that tolerance for anti-Catholic bigotry belonged to past eras, not the twenty-first century.

In the end, The DaVinci Code is a work of fiction. It may be considered an artistic success, and it certainly has been a financial success. This does not, however, make it true, for it certainly is not.

Dr. Craig Keener is professor of New Testament at American Baptist-related Palmer Theological Seminary. He has written scholarly commentaries on the gospels, and a recent article on The Da Vinci Code for Ministry Today magazine.

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